User:ChristianRomeroMendoza/sandbox

Literary career[edit source] 1920s[edit source] When Hurston arrived in New York City in 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was at its zenith, and she soon became one of the writers at its center. Shortly before she entered Barnard, Hurston's short story "Spunk" was selected for The New Negro, a landmark anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays focusing on African and African-American art and literature.[45] In 1926, a group of young black writers including Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Wallace Thurman, calling themselves the Niggerati, produced a literary magazine called Fire!! that featured many of the young artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance.

In 1927 Hurston traveled to the Deep South to collect African-American folk tales. She also interviewed Cudjoe Kazzola Lewis, of Africatown, Alabama, who was the last known survivor of the enslaved Africans carried aboard Clotilda, an illegal slave ship that had entered the US in 1860, and thus the last known person to have been transported in the Transatlantic slave trade. The next year she published the article "Cudjoe's Own Story of the Last African Slaver" (1928). According to her biographer Robert E. Hemenway, this piece largely plagiarized the work of Emma Langdon Roche,[46] an Alabama writer who wrote about Lewis in a 1914 book. Hurston did add new information about daily life in Lewis' home village of Bantè.[47]

Hurston intended to publish a collection of several hundred folk tales from her field studies in the South. She wanted to have them be as close to the original as possible, but struggled to balance the expectations of her academic adviser, Franz Boas, and her patron, Charlotte Osgood Mason. This manuscript was not published at the time. A copy was later found at the Smithsonian archives among the papers of anthropologist William Duncan Strong, a friend of Boas. Hurston's Negro Folk-tales from the Gulf States was published posthumously in 2001 as Every Tongue Got to Confess.[48]

In 1928 Hurston returned to Alabama with additional resources; she conducted more interviews of Lewis, took photographs of him and others in the community, and recorded the only known film footage of him - an African who had been trafficked to the United States through the slave trade. Based on this material, she wrote a manuscript, Barracoon, completing it in 1931. Hemenway described as "a highly dramatic, semifictionalized narrative intended for the popular reader."[49][50] It has also been described as a "testimonial text", more in the style of other anthropological studies since the late 20th century.

After this round of interviews, Hurston's literary patron, philanthropist Charlotte Osgood Mason, learned of Lewis and began to send him money for his support.[50] Lewis was also interviewed by journalists for local and national publications.[51] Hurston's manuscript Barracoon was eventually published posthumously on May 8, 2018.[52][53] "Barracoon", or barracks in Spanish, is where captured Africans were temporarily imprisoned before being shipped abroad.[53]

In 1929, Hurston moved to Eau Gallie, Florida, where she wrote Mules and Men. It was published in 1935.[54]